WASHINGTON — (April 20, 2026)  — Shield AI announced today its selection by the United States Navy to provide contractor-owned, contractor-operated (COCO) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) services in support of naval and joint force operations.    Under the Navy’s initiative to expand and modernize ISR capabilities, Shield AI will compete for up to $800 million in task orders alongside other selected industry partners, delivering persistent ISR using its V-BAT v...

Over on Bear Blog, Thereabouts posted “ The greatest breakfast food in existence ”. When I read the title, my face lit up. “A blog post about breakfast food!” It got me thinking about what breakfast brings me the most joy. I think the answer is waffles and coffee. This time around two years ago, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) had just been released and I was on a trip to the East Coast of the United States. I still remember the breakfasts: Waffles (almost) every day, purchased from...

Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API. Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API.

Wainwright’s Narconomics is one of my favorite books. In order to show how the free market really works, he went and studied it in its pure, unconstrained form: the cocaine cartels. It was a fun and insightful read, and ever since I first encountered it I’ve wanted him to go back and do a similar book about big tech companies. After all, they too sell artificially addictive products, treat the legal system as a mere expense, and are run by sociopathic narcissists. Wainwright’s thesis i...

Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism , or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions , democracy , or police brutality . Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly bipartisan , but the big anti-AI institutions are labor unions and the progressive wing of the Democrats. This has always seemed weird to me, because the contents of most anti-AI arguments are actually right-wing coded. They’re not nece...

Click to get it full-size front and back! I’m the guy who does “monsters on a business card” posts, and I just started at MCDM, so I should probably do a Draw Steel Monsters on a Business Card, right? Well it turns out I don’t have to! Amber over at amby.navy did it for me! If you’re new to DS, there are a lot of new terms here and it may look intimidating! Luckily, it’s all spelled out in a few pages in the introduction of Draw Steel: Monsters . (No reverse engineering req...

0.0 Context Setting It’s Thursday, 16 April, 2026 and unseasonably cold in Portland, Oregon. Before that, it was unseasonably warm. This jackpot sucks. Oh right, there’s also a podcast feed for, uh, some podcast episodes. Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on LibSyn Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on Apple Podcasts Let’s just get on with the thing that caught my attention. 1.0 Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 It’s (not) the economy, stupid...

Why not use a syntax highlighting library? These libraries take text as input and produce HTML as output. But on these interactive pages, the input is HTML. I have manually marked up the code with embedded interactive elements that respond to the reader's choices: The syntax highlighting libraries I looked at don't work on HTML out of the box. It's possible to merge two highlighters together but it can be tricky. Let's see what the merging looks like. To keep the examples concise...

Students playing Gimkit remotely often miss the shared classroom leaderboard. There’s a simple fix built into the game. Knowing how to view leaderboard on a student device in Gimkit takes one tap, and any student can do it during an active session without help from the teacher. Why Check the Leaderboard on a Student Device in Gimkit? In a physical classroom, the teacher usually displays the main leaderboard on a projector. Remote or hybrid sessions remove that shared view, so students lo...

Consider the following problem. Given a string, you must match all of the ASCII white-space characters ( \t , \n , \r , and the space) and some characters important in JSON ( : , , , [ , ] , { , } ). JSON is a text-based data format used for web services. A toy JSON document looks as follows. { "name" : "Alice" , "age" : 30 , "email" : "alice@example.com" , "tags" : [ "developer" , "python" , "open-source" ], "active" : true } We want to solve...

Path Robotics’ welding quadruped, via Nima Gard on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a quadruped welding robot, the China Shock 2.0, transformer startups, China’s mysteriously moving satellites, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but working on a more involved piece about constru...

Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models. Opus 4.7 shipped the other day (April 16, 2026) with a Claude.ai system prompt update since Opus 4.6 (February 5, 2026). I had Claude Code take the Markdown version of their system prompts , break that up into separa...

We’re going back back to the Apollo era back to human eyes at Luna back to views of our blue marble and back to bombing its civilians Back to the horrors of Vietnam in the schools of Iran while lunar astronauts look back “for all humanity” We’re going back with a translunar injection burn while leveling buildings in Lebanon in that same duration We’re going back back to taking pains for ensuring lunar crew safety but not the missile precision that avoids civilian casualty We’re going...

When is AI image slop ok? By Gordon Mclean Gordon stumbled across a post arguing that AI-generated featured images signals laziness, even if every word you write is your own, and it made him stop and think about his own blog. Read post ➡ This post piqued my interest, and surprise suprise, I have opinions. 🙃 I've spoken about my opinions on AI and image generation before and my opinion hasn't changed on that. I have, however, switched from ChatGPT to Claude, for reason...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with JTR, whose blog can be found at taonaw.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I go by JTR these days, which is based on an earlier pseudo...

At Oxford I focused my research and discussions on how we can use the tools of computational complexity to help us understand the power and limitations of machine learning. Last week I posted my paper How Does Machine Learning Manage Complexity? , a first step in this direction. Let me give a broad overview of the paper. Please refer to the paper for more technical details. Instead of focusing on the machine learning concepts like neural nets, transformers, etc., I wanted to abstract out a mode...

I’m in school again.  I’m going back to school because my work, my entire career, for my entire adult life, has been writing things for the Internet. That’s going away, at least as a livable career option. By livable, I mean an option I can live with .  When I started writing for the Internet, early 2000s, I could find decent paying gigs on Craigslist. A quarter a word wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t easy — I spent a lot of time searching and researching and answering inane qual...

I’ve been making liberal use of planets since I did my last RSS cleanup, and have discovered dozens of new blogs and people in the process :). Many large technical projects aggregate blogs from multiple people and sources into a single site “planet” and RSS feed, letting you easily subscribe en masse . It’s a great way to dive into a world without committing to subscribing to hundreds of separate blogs at once. Some are officially sanctioned by their titular projects, others are maint...

Humid air swirls with colorful spirits. They trace its invisible currents in spirals through open spaces, cling to branches, drip down stone faces and, awakened by the first beams of the rising sun, ooze newly out of trees like sap. Lulls of wind leave them gliding gently downward to be picked up again. From a distance, eddies of the spirits’ malleable confetti travel along plains. With translucent jellylike hands and fingers they wave at each other in passing or hold each other in breeze-pert...

I tried Claude Design yesterday and I have a theory for how this whole thing shakes out. As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs, it was pushed toward systematization — and Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on. Some concepts are borrowed from programming, some aren’t, and the whole thing doesn’t neatly map onto anything. Guidance evolves, migrations pile up, and if you want to au...

Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets, or the sun. While celestial navigation is accurate, cannot be jammed, and doesn't require any broadcast infrastructure, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to perform manually. In the early 1960s, an automated system was developed for the B-52 bomber to automatically track stars and compute navigation information. Digital computers weren't suitab...

In the first lab note in this series, I introduced the task framework and motivated it with a few examples. In this note, I’ll give you a more concrete picture of the framework — the set of concepts you need to understand in order to use it — and walk you through its implementation. Cast of characters Each user has a pool of task workers that can run tasks from a set of task queues that user contributes work to. A task is a unit of work. It has some code to run, an optional i...

This talk was given at State of the Browser (2026) . Check out the event talk page (which includes a talk transcript, too). We’ll talk about best practices to either reduce (or increase!) the JavaScript footprint on your web site to a sweet and very practical spot for best results. It’s far more common to have too much JavaScript on your web site, but can you go too far? Is zero JavaScript a worthwhile goal? Let’s talk about it! Video Wa...